I’ve never picked a theme word for the year. I don’t have a problem with it; it’s just never been my thing. Nor do I typically make resolutions. Only in the last few years have I begun working through a list of questions to help me pray and plan for the coming year.

When I sat down to work through my yearly questions, I discovered that I’m all dreamed out. I have great goals and ambitions on which I am praying and trusting God, but I can’t dream any further without taking action. I decided to move on, knowing that I can come back to the list later.

But it turns out that I have a word for this year. It came seemingly out of nowhere (but really we know that things that come out of nowhere often are a result of the Spirit’s leading).

Beauty.

For the last month or two, I’ve been really considering beauty—where it comes from, what its purpose is, and what we should do with it. I’m not sure what brought the idea of “beauty” to my mind (I’m sure it was some book I read), but I haven’t been able to shake the idea.

Until now, I valued things for their reality (or truth or tangibility, just not fake) and usefulness. Reality and usefulness were requirements for everything: for my time, work, books, music, even for hobbies. Beauty was not only optional, but was untrustworthy. The well-known verse from Proverbs 31 comes to mind: “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain…” Beauty was a veneer that either blurred the truth or hid its own deficit.

But I’m beginning to see what I’ve been missing. Our expressions of beauty are a reflection of the source of beauty. Beauty is a person, just as truth is a person. Beauty has a purpose, just like light has a purpose. Beauty is meant to be seen, acknowledged, experienced, and enjoyed in its fullness.

But as it turns out, I don’t care about beauty like I should. Things that are beautiful don’t give me pleasure and cause me to delight in God, the source of all beauty. I don’t experience the beauty of things, at least not in the way God intends for us to enjoy him. I don’t often glimpse the beauty in the stories he writes. Beauty is not an end in itself, but a lens through which we see the world as it should be.

Looking through beauty-correcting lenses means asking, “Is this beautiful? What about it is beautiful? How is this beauty a reflection of God’s beauty? How can I experience and enjoy this beauty as a foretaste of what I will experience fully with God?”

May we be captivated by God’s beauty as we notice his fingerprints over all of creation!

What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God's gift to man. (Ecclesiastes 3:9-13)